Compulsively Aimless

The mystical mountain regions of the Himalayas have captivated western imaginations: British imperial ambitions in the Great Game, spiritual questers seeking enlightenment, or hippies seeking a groovy end of a trail in Kathmandu.  Here's my miscellaneous collection.  1.  Seven Years in Tibet, Heinrich Harrer (1954).  Austrian Harrer was an expert mountaineer preparing to climb a Himalayan peak when he was interred in India by the British.  He escaped his internment camp to make his way into Tibet.  Harrer gains the confidence of a young Dali Lama and stays in the mountain country until 1950 when he was forced out by the Chinese Communists.  40 pages of black and white photos.  Later made into a movie with Brad Pitt as Harrer.  Book-of-the-Month Club edition.  Bought used at an unremembered location.    2.  Roof of the World: Tibet, Key to Asia, Amaury de Riencourt (1950).   In 1946, de ...

  I grew up on the Great Lakes.  The lakes were always a backdrop for work, play and history.  During his teenage years, my father worked as a steward on passenger ships between Detroit and Buffalo.  My hometown of Huron, Ohio is the southern most port on the Great Lakes.  In the 1970s, ocean going freighters would come from the Soviet Union or Taiwan to load grain from the town's landmark Pillsbury grain silos.  In next door Sandusky, the coal docks picked up rail cars and tipped trainloads of  Appalachian coal into ship holds.  In the summer, we would boat over to the islands of western lake Erie and take our vacation the northern shore of Lake Michigan.  In junior high, I was fascinated by the fact that Oliver Hazard Perry had won a major naval battle  a few miles off shore during the War of 1812.  I wrote an English paper in middle school on ship wrecks on Lake Erie.  In November of that year was the sinking of the Edmund F...